Return to Garbage World by mrjorts
Get yourself out of space and back onto the terrible planet that you love.
Control with keyboard or gamepad. Make as many landings as you can to maximize your score. The planet terrain gets more extreme as the levels go on.
How to play:
You start in orbit around a small planet. You want to bring your orbit in until you are close to the planet, then separate your lander from the booster to make your final descent. The lander has more thrust, since it is less massive, but it also has much less fuel, so time your separation carefully. If you've played a space game like Kerbal Space Program or Lunar Lander, it will be familiar. If not, this video talks about a similar landing in KSP. But the basic idea is that if you burn facing away from your current heading you will slow down, and if you slow down your orbit will get lower.
The camera in this game is always oriented so that the planet is beneath you, so down on the screen is the direction of gravity, and the direction you will need to go to reach land.
Your UI from left to right is:
ALT (altitude): Your altitude with maximum being your starting altitude, and minimum being sea level of the planet (note that terrain can be higher than sea level!)
VEL (velocity): Your current heading relative to your viewpoint. If the yellow line is facing right, then you are going clockwise around the planet. If it's facing down, you're heading straight for the surface!
ORBIT: A simple map of your position relative to the planet. This view is not adjusted to your perspective.
LVL (level): The current level you're on.
SCORE: How many points you've earned. You earn points for each level you beat, and the more fuel you have left over the more points you earn.
GAS: The amount of fuel left in your current stage. The booster and lander have separate fuel reserves, but the lander has much less, so use it wisely.
Controls:
A/D or left arrow/right arrow - Rotate counterclockwise/clockwise
W or up arrow - Thrust
Space or return - separate the lander from the booster
Escape - return to the main menu
Ratings
| Overall | 417th | 3.284⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 456th | 3.069⭐ | 60🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 426th | 3.076⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 638th | 2.805⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 359th | 3.246⭐ | 61🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 261th | 3.167⭐ | 59🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 264th | 3.132⭐ | 55🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 60🗳️ | 58🗨️ |
Great game, the music, mood and idea were all well done.
@kirillr Thanks. Based on the feedback, I am definitely prioritizing better communication, and a tutorial if I work on a post-jam version.
Possibly a bit too hard to land - a couple of first levels that was much easier would smooth out the difficulty curve a lot, since now it was a lot of dying over and over again at first.
Try our game too, maybe you'll like it)
Keep it up
Good Luck🍀
I'm a sucker for vector-style graphics, so I also want to join in and say that it's an incredibly pretty game. Took me a while to figure out up and down, but it was a lot of fun once I had things figured out. I think the explanation text was pretty clear though, it was just me having poor reading comprehension there. So yeah, very cool game.
I'm an avid KSP pilot, and as such had a decent idea of what was going on, but...had a bit of trouble with the lander. In a nutshell: it really probably shouldn't be the same mass as the main stage. I've done quite a few landings in KSP (in fact, that's basically what I'm best at by now), and typically, my landers are always packed with a lot of thrust, and not much fuel. I get up to (possibly dangerous) velocity dropping towards the planet on a radial-in trajectory, then point radial out and burn the landing thrusters a kilometer or two above the surface.
But...that's not how it works here. The lander seems to have the same mass as the booster, and its thrusters are equally powerful, there's just less fuel. I didn't have too much trouble de-orbiting, but the lander portion got me. Only managed a safe one once, all the others were either a crash with the lander, or a crash with the main stage trying to slow TO landing speeds. I think that's pilot's error, though - everything else is really solid.
Graphics = :green_heart:
The way I developed to play the game as I was making it was to circularize to a very low orbit, slow down as much as possible with the booster, and separate the lander as late as possible to kill the remaining velocity to reach ground. Although, that has as much to do with how the points are scored as it does with physics, since conserved lander fuel is worth more than booster fuel.
Anyway I liked playing it and the sound is good too! Well done!
Good luck, Don't forget to take a look at ours if you don't mind and see what it's like when we just focused on graphics in this game jam!
Game Link: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/spacelab-42a
Orbital mechanics are a little strange here, the trajectory does not look Keplerian. All those orbital mechanics things I learned from KSP don't apply. The gravitational acceleration should increase as objects get closer together. The force applied to the craft should be (some number / distance^2), which makes the orbits the right shape. The source code is 404, but love EXEs can be opened with 7zip, I saw that gravitational acceleration remains constant, as I suspected, seeing
```local gravity = vector.smul(-100, vector.normalize(r.position))```, thinking it should be something like ```local gravity = vector.sdiv(someConstantFromTrialAndError, r.position * r.position)``` (completely untested). Great job nonetheless.